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Monsters, Inc.
Monsters, Inc. is a 2001 American computer-animated comedy film directed by Pete Docter, produced by Pixar Animation Studios, and released by Walt Disney Pictures. John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton both served as executive producers. The film was co-directed by Lee Unkrich and David Silverman and stars the voices of John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn and Jennifer Tilly. The film centers on two monsters employed at the titular Monsters, Inc.: top scarer James P. "Sulley" Sullivan (John Goodman) and his one-eyed partner and best friend Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal). Monsters, Inc. employees generate their city's power by targeting and scaring children, but they are themselves afraid that the children may contaminate them; when one child enters Monstropolis, Mike and Sulley must return her. Docter began developing the film in 1996 and wrote the story with Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon, and Ralph Eggleston. Fellow Pixar director Andrew Stanton wrote the screenplay with screenwriter Daniel Gerson. The characters went through many incarnations over the film's five-year production process. The technical team and animators found new ways to render fur and cloth realistically for the film. Randy Newman, who composed the music for Pixar's three prior films, returned to compose its fourth. Monsters, Inc. was praised by critics and proved to be a major box office success from its release on November 2, 2001, generating over $562 million worldwide. Monsters, Inc. saw a 3D re-release in theaters on December 19, 2012. Its prequel, Monsters University, directed by Dan Scanlon, was released on June 21, 2013. Plot The parallel city of Monstropolis is inhabited by monsters and powered by the screams of children in the human world. At the factory of Monsters, Inc., employees called "scarers" venture into children's bedrooms to scare them and collect their screams, using closet doors as portals. This is considered a dangerous task because the monsters believe children are toxic and that touching them would be fatal. However, production is falling as children are becoming harder to scare and the company's chairman Henry J. Waternoose III is determined to find a solution. The top scarer is James P. "Sulley" Sullivan, who lives with his friend and assistant Mike Wazowski and has a rivalry with the ever-determined chameleon-like monster Randall Boggs. During an ordinary day's work on what is known as the "Scarefloor", another scarer accidentally brings a child's sock into the factory, causing the Child Detection Agency (CDA) to arrive and cleanse him. Mike is frequently ridiculed by the company's clerk Roz for never completing his paperwork on time. While working late at the factory, Sulley discovers that Randall left an activated door on the scarefloor and a young girl has entered the factory, much to Sulley's horror. After a few failed attempts to put her back, he places her in his bag and hides when Randall arrives and returns the door to storage. Mike is at a restaurant on a date with his girlfriend Celia when Sulley comes over to him for help, but chaos erupts when the girl is discovered in the restaurant, and the CDA is called. Sulley and Mike escape the CDA and take the girl home, discovering that she isn't toxic after all. Sulley quickly grows attached to the girl and names her "Boo". The next day, they smuggle her into the factory and Mike attempts to return her through her door. Randall discovers that Boo is in the factory after seeing Mike in the newspaper with her. He tries to kidnap Boo, but instead kidnaps Mike by mistake. In the basement, Randall reveals to Mike that he has built a torture machine called the Scream Extractor, which would make the company's current tactics redundant. Randall straps Mike to the chair for experimentation, but Sulley stops Randall by unplugging the machine and reports Randall to Waternoose. However, Waternoose is revealed to be in allegiance with Randall and exiles Mike and Sulley to the Himalayas. The two are taken in by Yeti, who tells them they can return to the factory through a nearby village. Sulley heads out, but Mike refuses to follow him out of frustration. Sulley returns to the factory and rescues Boo from the Scream Extractor. Mike returns to apologize to Sulley and inadvertently helps Sulley defeat Randall in a fight. Randall pursues Mike and Sulley as they race through the factory and ride on the doors heading into storage, taking them into a giant vault where millions of closet doors are stored. Boo's laughter activates the doors and allows the chase to pass in and out of the human world. When Randall attempts to kill Sulley, Boo is able to defeat Randall before Sulley and Mike trap him in the human world using a door to a trailer park, where he is beaten up by a pair of hillbillies. They are finally able to access Boo's door, but Waternoose and the CDA send it back to the Scarefloor. Mike distracts the CDA, while Sulley escapes with Boo and her door while Waternoose follows. While arguing with Sulley, Waternoose reveals that he is working with Randall to kidnap kids and build the Scream Extractor in order to keep the company from going out of business and put an end to the energy crisis. The CDA appears after hearing Waternoose's confession and arrest him. The CDA's leader is revealed to be Roz, who has been undercover for over two years trying to expose Waternoose's plot and thanks them for the help. Sulley and Mike say goodbye to Boo and return her home; on Roz's orders Boo's door is shredded. Sulley becomes the new chairman of Monsters Inc., and thanks to his experience with Boo, he comes up with a plan to end the company's energy crisis. Months later, Sulley's leadership has changed the company's workload. The monsters now enter children's bedrooms to make them laugh, since laughter is ten times more powerful than screams. Mike takes Sulley aside, revealing he has almost rebuilt Boo's door, requiring only one more piece which Sulley took as a memento. Sulley enters and reunites with Boo. Voice cast * John Goodman as James P. "Sulley" Sullivan, a giant furry blue friendly and sweet monster with horns and purple spots. Even though he excels at scaring children, he is kindhearted and thoughtful by nature. Sulley has a relaxed, outgoing and happy personality. In the film's beginning, he is "The Best Scarer" for several months running. * Billy Crystal as Michael "Mike" Wazowski, a green monster with a ball-shaped body, a single big eyeball, and skinny arms and legs, who runs Sulley's station on the scare floor, and they are close friends and roommates. Mike has an outgoing personality and is dating Celia Mae. He has an ego that often makes him forget something obvious, such as how his face is obscured in advertisements for the company. He makes cameo appearances in Finding Nemo, Cars, WALL-E, and Toy Story 3. * Mary Gibbs as Mary "Boo", a three-year-old human girl who is unafraid of any monster except Randall, who regularly scares her at night. She refers to Sulley as "Kitty". The book based on the film gives Boo's "real" name as Mary Gibbs, the name of her voice actress. In the film, one of Boo's drawings is covered with the name "Mary". * Steve Buscemi as Randall Boggs, an impatient, multi-legged lizard-shaped monster with a chameleon-like ability to change skin color and blend in completely with his surroundings. He is Mike and Sulley's rival in scream collection. * James Coburn as Henry J. Waternoose III, a half-crab monster with five eyes who is the CEO of Monsters, Inc., a job having been in his family for three generations. He holds a mentor-like relationship with Sulley, believing him to be the best scarer. * Jennifer Tilly as Celia Mae, a gorgon-like monster with one eye and tentacle-like legs who is the receptionist for Monsters, Inc. and Mike's girlfriend. * Bob Peterson as Roz, a slug-like monster with a raspy voice, similar to Selma Diamond's, who is the administrative clerk for Scarefloor F and "number 1" in the CDA, doing secret work around Monsters, Inc. for about 2 years. * John Ratzenberger as Yeti aka. The Abominable Snowman, a monster who was banished to the Himalayas. He was inspired by the Abominable Snowman from the 1964 Rankin/Bass animated special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. * Frank Oz as Jeff Fungus, Randall's red-skinned, nerdy three-eyed assistant, who is often bullied by Randall. * Dan Gerson as Smitty and Needleman, two goofy adolescent monsters with cracking voices who work as janitors and operate the Door Shredder when required; they also idolize Sulley. * Steve Susskind as Jerry Slugworth, a seven-fingered, red monster who is the Scare Floor Manager and Waternoose's good friend. * Bonnie Hunt as Ms. Flint, a female monster who trains new monsters to scare children. * Jeff Pidgeon as Thaddeus "Phlegm" Bile, a trainee scarer for Monsters, Inc. * Samuel Lord Black as George Sanderson, a furry monster with a horn on top of his head. He is the butt of a running gag in which he repeatedly contacts human artifacts by accident (due to his fur's static cling), triggering "23–19" incidents and humorously overblown reactions by the CDA resulting in his being shaved bald. * Phil Proctor as Charlie, George's assistant with sea-green skin, two octopus like arms, four tentacles as feet and snail-like eyes. He is friendly and admires Sulley and Mike's work, but calls out all of George's "23-19" incidents despite insisting they have a brotherly friendship. * Joe Ranft as Peter "Claws" Ward, a blue monster with razor-sharp claws and horrifying breath. Production Development The idea for Monsters, Inc. was conceived in a lunch in 1994 attended by John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft during the production of Toy Story. One of the ideas that came out of the brainstorming session was a film about monsters. "When we were making Toy Story", Docter said, "everybody came up to me and said 'Hey I totally believed that my toys came to life when I left the room.' So when Disney asked us to do some more films, I wanted to tap into a child-like notion that was similar to that. I knew monsters were coming out of my closet when I was a kid. So I said 'Hey, lets do a film about monsters." Docter began work on the film that would become Monsters, Inc. in 1996 while others focused on A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999). Its code name was Hidden City, named for Docter's favorite restaurant in Point Richmond. By early-February 1997, Docter had drafted a treatment together with Harley Jessup, Jill Culton, and Jeff Pidgeon that bore some resemblance to the final film. Docter pitched the story to Disney with some initial artwork on February 4 that year. He and his story team left with some suggestions in hand and returned to pitch a refined version of the story on May 30. At this pitch meeting, longtime Disney animator Joe Grant – whose work stretched back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) – suggested the title Monsters, Inc., a play on the title of a gangster film Murder, Inc., which stuck. Writing Docter's initial concept for the film went through many changes, but he found the notion of monsters living in their own world to be an appealing and workable one. His original idea featured a 30-year-old man dealing with monsters that he drew in a book as a child coming back to bother him as an adult. Each monster represented a fear he had, and conquering those fears caused the monsters eventually to disappear. After Docter scrapped the initial concept of a 30-year-old terrified of monsters, he decided on a buddy story between a monster and a child titled simply Monsters, in which the monster character of Sulley (known at this stage as Johnson) was an up-and-comer at his workplace, where the company's purpose was to scare children. Sulley's eventual sidekick, Mike Wazowski, had not yet been added. Between 1996 and 2000, the lead monster and child went through radical changes as the story evolved. As the story continued to develop, the child varied in age and gender. Ultimately, the story team decided that a girl would be the best counterpart for a furry, 8 feet (96 in) tall co-star. After a girl was settled upon, the character continued to undergo changes, at one point being from Ireland and at another time being an African-American character. Originally the character of the little girl, known as Mary, became a fearless seven-year-old who has been toughened by years of teasing and pranks from four older brothers. In stark contrast, Johnson is nervous about the possibility of losing his job after the boss at Monsters, Inc. announces a downsizing is on the way. He feels envious because another scarer, Ned (who later became Randall), is the company's top performer. Through various drafts, Johnson's occupation went back-and-forth from being a scarer and from working in another area of the company such as a janitor or a refinery worker, until his final incarnation as the best scarer at Monsters, Inc. Johnson was originally planned to have tentacles for feet; however, this caused many problems in early animation tests. The idea was later largely rejected, as it was thought that audience would be distracted by the tentacles. Mary's age also differed from draft to draft until the writers settled on the age of 3. "We found that the younger she was, the more dependent she was on Sulley", Docter said. Eventually Johnson was renamed Sullivan. The name was suggested by an animator who had attended Texas A&M University, inspired by one of Texas A&M's historic icons, Lawrence Sullivan Ross, nicknamed "Sully" by students. Sullivan was also planned to wear glasses throughout the film. However, the creators found it a dangerous idea because the eyes were a perfectly readable and clear way of expressing a character's personality; thus, the idea was rejected. The idea of a monster buddy for the lead monster emerged at an April 6, 1998 "story summit" in Burbank with employees from Disney and Pixar. A term coined by Lasseter, a "story summit" was a crash exercise that would yield a finished story in only two days. Such a character, the group agreed, would give the lead monster someone to talk to about his predicament. Development artist Ricky Nierva drew a concept sketch of a rounded, one-eyed monster as a concept for the character, and everyone was generally receptive to it. Docter named the character Mike for the father of his friend Frank Oz, a director and Muppet performer. Jeff Pidgeon and Jason Katz story-boarded a test in which Mike helps Sulley choose a tie for work, and Mike Wazowski soon became a vital character in the film. Originally, Mike had no arms and had to use his legs as appendages; however, due to some technical difficulties, arms were soon added to him. Screenwriter Dan Gerson joined Pixar in 1999 and worked on the film with the filmmakers on a daily basis for almost two years. He considered it his first experience in writing a feature film. He explained, "I would sit with Pete Docter and David Silverman and we would talk about a scene and they would tell me what they were looking for. I would make some suggestions and then go off and write the sequence. We'd get together again and review it and then hand it off to a story artist. Here's where the collaborative process really kicked in. The board artist was not beholden to my work and could take liberties here and there. Sometimes, I would suggest an idea about making the joke work better visually. Once the scene moved on to animation, the animators would plus the material even further." Casting Bill Murray was considered for the voice role of James P. "Sulley" Sullivan. He screen tested for the role and was interested, but when Pete Docter was unable to make contact with him, he took it as a "no". The voice role of Sulley went to John Goodman, the longtime co-star of the comedy series Roseanne and a regular in the films of the Coen brothers. Goodman interpreted the character to himself as the monster equivalent of a National Football League player. "He's like a seasoned lineman in the tenth year of his career," he said at the time. "He is totally dedicated and a total pro." Billy Crystal, having regretted turning down the part of Buzz Lightyear years prior, accepted that of Mike Wazowski, Sulley's one-eyed best friend and scare assistant. The casting of Steve Buscemi as Randall, Sulley's rival, saw a reunion between himself and John Goodman; they had previously worked together on The Big Lebowski and Barton Fink. Animation In November 2000, early in the production of Monsters, Inc., Pixar packed up and moved for the second time since its Lucasfilm years. The company's approximately 500 employees had become spread among three buildings, separated by a busy highway. The company moved from Point Richmond to a much bigger campus, co-designed by Lasseter and Steve Jobs, in Emeryville. In production, Monsters Inc. differed from earlier Pixar features in that each main character had its own lead animator — John Kahrs on Sulley, Andrew Gordon on Mike, and Dave DeVan on Boo. Kahrs found that the "bearlike quality" of Goodman's voice provided an exceptionally good fit with the character. He faced a difficult challenge, however, in dealing with Sulley's sheer mass; traditionally, animators conveyed a figure's heaviness by giving it a slower, more belabored movement, but Kahrs was concerned that such an approach to a central character would give the film a sluggish feel. Like Goodman, Kahrs came to think of Sulley as a football player, one whose athleticism enabled him to move quickly in spite of his size. To help the animators with Sulley and other large monsters, Pixar arranged for Rodger Kram, a University of California, Berkeley expert on the locomotion of heavy mammals, to lecture on the subject. Adding to Sulley's lifelike appearance was an intense effort by the technical team to refine the rendering of fur. Other production houses had tackled realistic fur, most notably Rhythm & Hues in its 1993 polar bear commercials for Coca-Cola and in its talking animals' faces in Babe (1995). Monsters, Inc., however, required fur on a far larger scale. From the standpoint of Pixar's engineers, the quest for fur posed several significant challenges. One was figuring out how to animate the huge numbers of hairs – 2,320,413 on Sulley – in a reasonably efficient way. Another was making sure the hairs cast shadows on other hairs. Without self-shadowing, fur or hair takes on an unrealistic flat-colored look. (The hair on Andy's toddler sister, as seen in the opening sequence of Toy Story, is an example of hair without self-shadowing.) The first fur test had Sullivan run an obstacle course. Results were not satisfactory, as objects would catch the fur and stretch it out because of the extreme amount of motion. Another similar test was also unsuccessful, with the fur going through the objects. Eventually Pixar set up a Simulation department and created a new fur simulation program called Fizt (short for "physics tool"). After a shot with Sulley had been animated, the Simulation department took the data for the shot and added his fur. Fizt allowed the fur to react in a natural way. When Sulley moved, the fur would automatically react to his movements, taking into account the effects of wind and gravity as well. The Fizt program also controlled movement on Boo's clothing, which provided another breakthrough. The deceptively simple-sounding task of animating cloth was also a challenge to animate because of the hundreds of creases and wrinkles that automatically occurred in the clothing when the wearer moved. It also meant solving the complex problem of how to keep cloth untangled – that is, how to keep it from passing through itself when parts of it intersect. Fizt applied the same system to Boo's clothes as to Sulley's fur. Boo would first be animated shirtless; the Simulation department then used Fizt to apply the shirt over Boo's body, and when she moved, her clothes would react to her movements in a natural manner. To solve the problem of cloth-to-cloth collisions, Michael Kass, Pixar's senior scientist, was joined on Monsters, Inc. by David Baraff and Andrew Witkin and developed an algorithm they called "global intersection analysis" to handle the problem. The complexity of the shots in Monsters, Inc. – including elaborate sets such as the door vault – required more computing power to render than any of Pixar's earlier efforts combined. The render farm in place for Monsters, Inc. was made up of 3500 Sun Microsystems processors, compared with 1400 for Toy Story 2 and only 200 for Toy Story. Release The film premiered on October 28, 2001 at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California. It was theatrically released on November 2, 2001 in the United States, in Australia on December 26, 2001, and in the United Kingdom on February 8, 2002. The theatrical release was accompanied with the Pixar short animated film For the Birds. As in A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2, a montage of "outtakes" and a performance of the company play were made and included in the end credits of the film sometime later. After the success of the 3D re-release of The Lion King, Disney and Pixar re-released Monsters, Inc. in 3D on December 19, 2012. Home media Monsters, Inc. was released on VHS and DVD on September 17, 2002. It was then released on Blu-ray on November 10, 2009, and on Blu-ray 3D on February 19, 2013. Reception Box office Monsters, Inc. ranked No. 1 at the box office its opening weekend, grossing $62,577,067 in North America alone. The film had a small drop-off of 27.2% over its second weekend, earning another $45,551,028. In its third weekend, the film experienced a larger decline of 50.1%, placing itself in the second position just after Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. In its fourth weekend, however, there was an increase of 5.9%, making $24,055,001 that weekend for a combined total of over $525 million. As of May 2013, it is the eighth-biggest fourth weekend ever for a film. The film made $289,916,256 in North America, and $272,900,000 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $562,816,256. The film is Pixar's ninth highest-grossing film worldwide and sixth in North America. For a time, the film went on to take the place of Toy Story 2 as the second highest-grossing animated film of all time, behind only The Lion King. In the U.K., Ireland and Malta, it earned £37,264,502 ($53,335,579) in total, marking the sixth highest-grossing animated film of all time in the country and the thirty-second highest-grossing film of all time. In Japan, although earning $4,471,902 during its opening and ranking second behind The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for the weekend, on subsequent weekends it moved to first place due to exceptionally small decreases or even increases and dominated for six weeks at the box office. It finally reached $74,437,612, standing as 2002's third highest-grossing film and the third largest U.S. animated feature of all time in the country behind Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo. Critical reception Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 96% based on 192 reviews, with an average score of 8/10. The critical consensus was: "Clever, funny, and delightful to look at, Monsters, Inc. delivers another resounding example of how Pixar elevated the bar for modern all-ages animation." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 78 based on 34 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews." Charles Taylor from Salon.com stated: "It's agreeable and often funny, and adults who take their kids to see it might be surprised to find themselves having a pretty good time." Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times gave a positive review, praising the film's use of "creative energy": "There hasn't been a film in years to use creative energy as efficiently as Monsters, Inc." Although Mike Clark from USA Today thought the comedy was sometimes "more frenetic than inspired and viewer emotions are rarely touched to any notable degree," he thought the film to be as "visually inventive as its Pixar predecessors." ReelViews film critic James Berardinelli, who gave the film 31⁄2 stars out of 4 wrote, saying that Monsters, Inc. was "one of those rare family films that parents can enjoy (rather than endure) along with their kids." Roger Ebert, film critic from Chicago Sun-Times, who gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, called the film "cheerful, high-energy fun, and like the other Pixar movies, has a running supply of gags and references aimed at grownups." Lisa Schwarzbaum, a film critic for Entertainment Weekly, giving the film a B, praised the film's animation, stating "Everything from Pixar Animation Studios, the snazzy, cutting-edge computer animation outfit, looks really, really terrific, and unspools with a liberated, heppest-moms-and-dads-on-the-block iconoclasm." Accolades Monsters, Inc. won the Academy Award for Best Original Song (Randy Newman, after fifteen previous nominations, for If I Didn't Have You). It was one of the first animated films to be nominated for Best Animated Feature (lost to Shrek). It was also nominated for Best Original Score (lost to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) and Best Sound Editing (lost to Pearl Harbor). At the Kid's Choice Awards in 2002, it was nominated for "Favorite Voice in an Animated Movie" for Billy Crystal (who lost to Eddie Murphy in Shrek). The American Film Institute nominated "If I Didn't Have You" in the AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs category. Music Monsters Inc. was Randy Newman's fourth feature film collaboration with Pixar. The end credits song "If I Didn't Have You" was sung by John Goodman and Billy Crystal. The album was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. The score lost both these awards to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, but after sixteen nominations, the song "If I Didn't Have You" finally won Newman his first Academy Award for Best Original Song. It also won a Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media. Lawsuits Shortly before the film's release, Pixar was sued by children's song writer Lori Madrid of Wyoming, stating that the company had stolen her ideas from her 1997 poem "There's a Boy in My Closet." Madrid mailed her poem to six publishers in October 1999, notably Chronicle Books, before turning it into a local stage musical in August 2001. After seeing the trailer for Monsters, Inc., Madrid concluded that Chronicle Books had passed her work to Pixar and that the film was based on her work. In October 2001, she filed the suit against Chronicle Books, Pixar, and Disney in a federal court in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Her lawyer asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction, that would forbid Pixar and Disney from releasing the film while the suit was pending. In a hearing on November 1, 2001 – the day before the film's scheduled release on 5,800 screens in 3,200 theaters across the country – the judge refused to issue the injunction. On June 26, 2002, he ruled that the film had nothing in common with the poem. In November 2002, Stanley Mouse filed a lawsuit, in which he alleged that the characters of Mike and Sulley were based on drawings of Excuse My Dust, a film that he had tried to sell to Hollywood in 1998. The lawsuit also stated that a story artist from Pixar visited Mouse in 2000, and discussed Mouse's work with him. A Disney spokeswoman responded, by saying that the characters in Monsters, Inc. were "developed independently by the Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures creative teams, and do not infringe on anyone's copyrights". The case was ultimately settled under undisclosed terms. Prequel A prequel, titled Monsters University, was released on June 21, 2013. John Goodman, Billy Crystal, and Steve Buscemi reprised their roles of Sulley, Mike, and Randall, while Dan Scanlon directed the film. The prequel's plot focuses on Sulley and Mike's studies at Monsters University, where they start off as rivals but soon become best friends. Other media An animated short, Mike's New Car, was made by Pixar in 2002 in which the two main characters have assorted misadventures with a car Mike has just bought. This film was not screened in theaters, but is included with all home video releases of Monsters, Inc., and on Pixar's Dedicated Shorts DVD. In August 2002, a manga version of Monsters, Inc. was made by Hiromi Yamafuji and distributed in Kodansha's Comic Bon Bon magazine in Japan; the manga was published in English by Tokyopop until it went out of print. A series of video games, including a multi-platform video game were created based on the film. The video games included Monsters, Inc., Monsters, Inc. Scream Team and Monsters, Inc. Scream Arena. A game titled Monsters, Inc. Run was released on the App Store for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad on December 13, 2012. Feld Entertainment toured a Monsters, Inc. edition of their Walt Disney's World on Ice skating tour from 2003 to 2007. Monsters, Inc. has inspired three attractions at Disney theme parks around the world. In 2006 Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue! opened at Disneyland Resort's Disney California Adventure in Anaheim, California. In 2007, Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor opened at Walt Disney World Resort's Magic Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, replacing The Timekeeper. The show is improvisational in nature, and features the opportunity for Guests to interact with the monster comedians and submit jokes of their own via text message. In 2009 Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek opened at Tokyo Disney Resort's Tokyo Disneyland in Chiba, Japan. In 2009, Boom! Studios produced a Monsters Inc. comic book mini-series that ran for four issues. The storyline takes place after the movie and focuses on Sulley and Mike's daily struggles to operate Monsters Inc. on its new laughter-focused company policy. At the same time, their work is impeded by the revenge schemes of Randall and Waternoose, as well as a human child (indirectly revealed to be Sid Phillips from the Toy Story franchise) who has hijacked the company's closet door technology to commit a string of toy thefts throughout the human world. Category:Monsters, Inc. Category:Films Category:2001 Films Category:English-language Films Category:Computer-animated Films Category:American Films Category:Comedy Films Category:Science Fiction Films Category:Disney Category:Pixar